"Deni Seymour" might be able to help you with that name.

Hy, I have no idea, but... can be something related with honey, people who lived around that market, or that food? I was remembering Honninton, in England, was a town specialiced in honey... I say that because "querochar" is:

1. intr. Dicho de las abejas y de otros insectos: Poner la querocha.

And querocha is: "Conjunto de huevos que pone la reina de las abejas."

Hi Leonor, interesting idea; I wasn't aware of the word "querocha" and its meaning.

In the meantime, though, I've found a Spanish reference relating to the Coronado expedition of 1540-42 which indicates that the word "Querechos" came from one of the Pueblo languages. Basically, "Querechos" is what the Spaniards heard and transcribed, but what the original native word is or what it actually means I'm still trying to figure out.

Michael, ask David Charles Wright-Carr, an authority on onomastics and topography in Mexico. I would bet that he can give you insights on querechos.

Thanks Nelson. Since posting the question, I've learned that "Querechos" as it appears in the 16th-century documentation is most likely a Spanish corruption of a Keresan word for Apaches.

Even so, Michael, if you ran that same question by David Carr-Wright, who publishes in Spanish on Mexican tribes, you might be on surer ground. He is eminently approachable and in Researchgate.

Dear Michael:

The word "querecho" doesn't mean anything in Nahuatl or Otomi. I checked Cobarruvias vocabulary (1611) and didn't find anything in old Castilian. I quickly checked some chronicles of the Colegios de Propaganda Fide and came up blank (although the indices are incomplete). Then I opened up one of Peter Gerhard's reference works on historical geography and found something in his description of the province of San Buenaventura, in NW Chihuahua:

"El primer contacto europeo puede haberse dado en la temprana fecha de 1535 (Krieger, 1991, p. 471). Treinta años después, Francisco de Ibarra, acompañado de un pequeño ejército, pasó de Sonora a Paquimé (Casas Grandes), alguna vez un gran centro comercial que tal vez tuvo 5 000 habitantes, aunque en la época de Ibarra era una ruina impresionante habitada por primitivos casadores-recolectores a los que él llamó querechos (Obregón, 1928, p. XXI; Di Peso, 1966, p. 21-23). Cuando llegaron los franciscanos --un siglo después-- el área estaba ocupada por dos grupos: los conchos en el sur y los sumas (¿=janos?) en el norte, ninguno de los cuales practicaba la agricultura. Los conchos probablemente pertenecían a la rama taracahita, aunque la lengua que hablaban los sumas (si es que se les puede identificar con los janos) podría pertenecer a la familia atapascana (Sauer, 1934; Spicer, 1962, p. 231, 455; Navarro García, 1967, p. 254)."

Gerhard, Peter, La frontera norte de la Nueva España, Patricia Escandón Bolaños, traductora, México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996, p. 285.

Thank you, David for your time and input,

the Obregon reference to Ibarra's trip to the Paquime area is fascinating as Obregon was well read up on the early "travel literature", as it were, of the northern frontier (Alvar Nunez and Coronado). Coronado's people were the first to use Querechos as far as is known. Obregon read the available accounts and may even have met some of Coronado's men. He definitely did talk to the members of the Rodriguez-Chamuscado and Espejo-Beltran expeditions, who had just been to Nuevo Mexico. From them he would also have heard about the Querechos and by the time he wrote his Historia in 1585 he applied the name to the hunter-gatherers he had seen while he was with Ibarra in the northwest in the mid-1560s.

All that suggests to me some sort of reverse migration of a Pueblo (probably Keres) word which the Spaniards first heard in 1541, and which they used for about 60 years to refer to some Apache groups (similar to the word "Vaqueros" for the buffalo plains Apaches) or groups that to them looked like Apache groups - a sort of lifestyle description, if you will, not unlike the word "Chichimecas" (which in some contexts the Spanish explorers of New Mexico actually used interchangeably with Querechos/Vaqueros).

Thanks again, Michael

The origin of the term “Querecho,” from the book titled “El Llano Estecado” (1997) by John Miller Morris; Ch. 2, titled “Lo Llano: the Plain beyond Cíbola,” p. 29:

Scouting through a heavy morning ground fog for two days later on May 20, 1541, several of the advance guard observed strange, continuous markings on the ground, as if someone was deliberately dragging lances along the ground. Following these curious markings brought the conquistadors to a small and most curious encampment of bison-hunting natives. Wearing tanned skins and living in tipi-like tents, these “Querechos” were the first denizens of the buffalo plains that Coronado’s party encountered. They were nomads, los naturales of Lo Llano, who traveled, said Castañeda, “like the Arabs, with their tents and troops of dogs loaded with poles.” Today the term “Querecho” is taken to refer to the ancestral eastern Apaches, the Athapaskan-speaking tribes that diffused Southward onto the Great Plains after A.D. 1250, perhaps dislodged and swept south by aspects of cold climactic change and tribal war. Although relative newcomers to the Southern Plains, eastern Apaches were an adaptive, highly skipped hunting people. They had traded the flat expanses of the north for those of the south, and their skills in roaming the plains were second to none.

They dominated the northern Llano country of the mid-sixteenth century, and they actively raided---and perhaps warred---with the pueblos to the west. Indeed, their provisioning of the puebloans with warm robes, rawhide shields, and bison protein helped maintain an old symbiotic set of relationships between agrarian pueblo and nomadic ranchería. Some confusion over the exact nature of the Spanish term “Querecho” still exists. But if the bison reminded Cabeza de Vaca of the North African environment, it was the nomadic Querecho way of life that led Castañeda to draw a similar inference. The Spanish quickly understood that the strange markings had been made by the large native dogs lugging tent poles and equipment [i.e., the travois] from one campsite to another.

As for the etymology or morphology of the term “Querecho,” Miller does not say. This is little/no help, but there you are.

Thanks Lane. As the word "Querechos" does not seem to appear anywhere before 1540 it is likely that it's origin is with one of the Puebloan languages and was picked up and "hispanicized" by Coronado's people. The Keres pueblos apparently called Apaches "Kirayash" or "Q'irauash"; this could well be the root of the word "Querechos".

As for the time depth of the Athapaskan presence in the US Southwest, I don't think there can be any doubt that it precedes the first Spanish appearance there by quite some time. How much time, however, is far from clear and subject to considerable debate.

Regards, Michael